That's when I told them that if I asked that same question at Dillard in 1906 or 1926 or 1946 or 1966, hardly anybody in the room would've raised their hand.

Now, it's the norm.

What in the hell happened?

Did black folk all of a sudden become criminals and thugs after the March on Washington?

Of course not.

In Michelle Alexander's essential book, "The New Jim Crow," she skillfully unpacks how the "War on Drugs" was created in the wake of the civil rights movement to criminalize blackness. She then takes readers on a journey through modern America to show how laws and commissions and departments and tasks forces were created to deliberately target and undermine black communities. It worked.

The proof was in those hands that were raised last week in New Orleans.

"The New Jim Crow" is not a 300-page conspiracy theory. It is, in essence, a well researched blueprint for how a terrible system of legal white supremacy was birthed, nurtured, and grown into multi-billion dollar industry on the back of what is now the world's largest prison population.

Alexander gave academic voice to what black folk have known for nearly 50 years — the "War on Drugs" was deliberately and knowingly designed to destroy black communities.

For me, her book was enough. I use her words as a pillar of nearly every speech I give on college campuses all over the country.

"We knew we couldn't make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities,” said John Ehrlichman, Nixon’s domestic policy chief. (AP)

What we have just learned, though, from a newly released interview of John Ehrlichman, who served as President Richard Nixon's domestic policy chief, has co-signed every single word Alexander has been saying for years — the "War on Drugs" truly was a white supremacist plot with the worst intentions imaginable.

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"You want to know what this was really all about," Ehrlichman, who died in 1999, said in the interview after Baum asked him about Nixon's harsh anti-drug policies.

"The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I'm saying," Ehrlichman continued.

"We knew we couldn't make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did."

This didn't come from a mailroom intern, Ehrlichman was the primary architect of domestic policy for Nixon. He and Nixon were extremely close. He worked for Nixon's 1960 presidential campaign, his 1962 campaign for governor in California, and eventually for Nixon's 1968 White House bid. Once elected, Nixon made Ehrlichman White House counsel and then chief policy advisor, where he became an indispensable part of Nixon's inner circle.

To have him say, in his own words, that because they couldn't make it illegal to be black, that the White House set out to find a new way to "disrupt" and "discredit" black communities and organizations, is a punch in the gut. This war that they created, and that was subsequently grown and advanced by the government for the 50 years that followed, has done an amazing job achieving its true goal — the widespread criminalization of blackness in America.

It never really was a "War on Drugs," but a war on black folk.

White people are actually more likely to both sell and use drugs in America than African-Americans, but if we asked any random stranger to describe what a drug dealer looks like, do you think the composite will look like Trayvon Martin or Nick Jonas? That's a rhetorical question. Embedded into American culture is the myth that drug dealers are young black men with hoodies and sagging jeans when the fact of the matter is just that this is who police choose to punish most for dealing drugs. The local media then plays along and shows these young men on the nightly news like clockwork. It's a complete farce.

What Alexander begs us to understand, and what Nixon policy chief Ehrlichman made abundantly clear, is that none of this was an accident. Policies, and their enforcement, are loaded with intent.

Governments, on the local, state, and federal level, fully intended for African-Americans to pay an outrageous and disproportionate penalty for the possession and distribution of drugs in America.

Now that we are unmistakably clear on the nefarious and racist origins of the "War on Drugs," it must be dismantled. It's an emergency, really. Everything about how and why that system was built permeates it to this very day.